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A way to markup times so that display can be based on timezones
Open, LowPublicFeature

Description

Author: shreevatsa.public

Description:
It would be nice if there is a way to specify times on a wiki page in such a way
that users see it in their own timezones. That is, I'm suggesting a new markup
syntax, so that users will see a time as either "December 26, 2005 01:47 GMT" or
"December 25, 2005 19:47 EST" (or something like that) depending on the timezone
in their preferences.

I was told on IRC that this would not be a desirable feature for something like
Wikipedia (having user preferences prevents caching), but it should be a simple
matter to implement, and other low-traffic sites using MediaWiki will benefit
from it, IMHO.


Version: unspecified
Severity: enhancement

Details

Reference
bz5347

Event Timeline

bzimport raised the priority of this task from to Low.Nov 21 2014, 9:10 PM
bzimport set Reference to bz5347.
bzimport added a subscriber: Unknown Object (MLST).

robchur wrote:

Having user preferences does not prevent caching.

Timezone-based preferences would multiply space requirements for caching (or reduce the number of pages
which can be held in cache), so I would still be pretty leery of it.

This can be done with a tag extension and doesn't require core code changes.

Adding bug 19992 (JS client-side date formatting) as a dependency, as this is the most likely way to actually handle flexible date formatting (doesn't break parser cache, doesn't break HTTP cache, and allows even anonymous users with no login information to use their computer's timezone settings with no manual intervention).

Aklapper changed the subtype of this task from "Task" to "Feature Request".Feb 4 2022, 11:01 AM
Aklapper removed a subscriber: wikibugs-l-list.